Yahya Abu al-Hammam

Yahya Abu al-Hammam (5 September 1978-) was a senior leader of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the head of AQIM's operations in the Sahel region of North Africa.

Biography
Jemal Oukacha was born on 5 September 1978 in Reghaia, Algeria to a Sunni Muslim family. He waged jihad in North Africa since the 1990s, being detained for eighteen months during the Algerian Civil War before joining the al-Qaeda-linked Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC). He took on the kunya of "Yahya Abu al-Hammam" and joined Mokhtar Belmokhtar's army in the Sahara in 2004, fighting in northern Mali and Mauritania. In 2005, one of his attacks against the Mauritanian military on the Lemgheity barracks killed 17 soldiers. Later, he became the AQIM emir of Timbuktu, and he named Abdelhamid Abou Zeid as his deputy. Hammam had multiple Western hostages executed during his terrorist campaign in the Sahel, and in 2010 he was sentenced to death in absentia by the Algerian government on terrorism charges. On 8 July 2016, he released an audio message calling for Muslim Malians to fight against France.